# Out of band (was: builtin prompt support)

Michael Brundage (anomaly@u.washington.edu)
Sat, 10 Aug 1996 12:19:04 PDT

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    On Sat, 10 Aug 1996, Michael Reece wrote:
    > this is unrelated to built-in prompts, which i care little about, but i
    > have written verbs that do not display any output to the player. they are
    > used for handshaking on a moo client i have written. if is effective since
    > the client does not print out the command iwhen it is sent, and the
    > command produces no output. the user remains ignorant. as users should be.

    Um, there is already a facility for this: out-of-band commands.
    Check out the section on it in the programmer's manual for details;
    essentially, you can set an out-of-band prefix (usually set to #$#) such
    that all lines of input to the MOO beginning with #$# are sent to
    $do_out_of_band_command() instead of $do_command().

    Of course, most ordinary clients (such as telnet or Netscape) don't
    recognize this feature and will display lines from the MOO to the user
    regardless of their prefix; however, since you've written your own MOO
    client, it should be easy for you to parse this output separately from
    the usual output (sent directly to the user).

    michael